How to convert text into shapes with Adobe Illustrator

Have you ever needed to send something to a printer and it didn’t print out correctly? It’s most likely to that the printer didn’t have the exact font that you had. There are ways to embed fonts into PDFs but it adds size to the document.

I prefer to convert the text into shapes. I must warn you. If you convert text into shapes it’s a one way trip. You can’t convert shapes back into text.

You might be wondering if there are any other reasons why you’d want to convert Font text into shapes. Logo design is one of the main reason’s to convert a font you already have and tweak it to fit the project.

Here’s an example of converting Text into shapes:

Obviously W’s and g’s don’t look like this out of the box. By converting the word “Winning” and the thin black rectangles into shapes and then merging them. You are able to get something that looks completely different then the regular font.

Now that you know WHY you would want to convert text into shapes with Adobe Illustrator, let’s look at “how to convert text into shapes with Adobe Illustrator”.

First you want to make sure that the “Text” layer is meat balled. See red box.

Next you need to run the command “Create Outlines”. This is found under the “Type” menu. You can also use the keyboard shortcut “Shift+Ctrl+O”.

Once you do that. Go back to the layers dock. You will see something interesting. Each letter has become it’s own object. All the letters will be added to a new group.

Notice the “g” on the left hand side is now a compound path. You can now edit the letter even further if you wanted/had to.

It’ isn’t that hard to do the conversion but I find the “Create Outlines” for what ever reason doesn’t jump out at my in the drop down list. Now that your word is turned into shapes you can go in and do anything you can do with shapes which is a lot!

Hope you enjoyed the article on “How to convert text into shapes with Adobe Illustrator”.